Science and technology

Internet gaming

Artificial intelligence

WORD games reward people with a vast vocabulary and the ability to sort a jumble of letters into the most unusual concatenations. Cheating is hard because consulting a dictionary or an anagram-solving website would be rather conspicuous to the other players. Online, such obvious skullduggery would go undetected. Or would it?

Take the recently launched Letterpress. The game, to which Babbage has become addicted, requires players to create words from letters displayed on a five-by-five grid. The grid is generated for each match according to rules that ensure a sufficient supply of vowels and consonants. (Letterpress is free, but 99¢ will buy you the ability to play multiple games at once.) Playing a word claims the letter tiles that comprise it, whether ones that another player currently has totted up toward his score or unclaimed tiles, with a few nuances to allow locking up letters. A word may be played just once, which also excludes any truncation of the words: sailors eliminates sailor and sail, but still allows sailing, sails and mainsail. The game proceeds until the last tile is claimed. This may happen after a handful of rounds or take nearly 100 turns, as Babbage recently discovered.

Making sense of ZVBTYRVCBPE (letters left in one recent game) can be trying. This is where abundant "cheater" apps come in. Not long after Letterpress came Letterpress Solver and a panoply of other programs purposely designed to game Letterpress. They joined the ranks of generalist cheater apps that work for a range of lexical challenges. All such programs make use of a simple expedient. Apple's mobile operating system, iOS, allows for screen capture. In order to cut corners, you grab the challenging screen in Letterpress, Scrabble or another similar game, launch the helper app and select the appropriate image from the photo library. The insidious software performs optical character recognition (OCR) to extract available letters and to analyse the grid.

Letterpress' creator, Loren Brichter (formerly of Twitter), has no clue why people cheat. The game does not track statisitics. If you win, you do not get a prize or a badge, he says. You certainly do not get money. Crucially, an opponent who had stuck to simple words and then sprouts "sesquipedalian" will inevitably stoke suspicion that he availed himself of an algorithmic aid. "Using it, you're a dick," Mr Brichter says. But building one is something else entirely. That, he thinks, "is awesome".

The simplest apps simply provide lists of potential answers. The best employ elaborate forms of artificial intelligence to provide the optimal solution. Although only a finite number of words may be formed in any given grid, with that number reduced each turn by the words played (along with truncations), an artificial-intelligence routine can look at how a word played in one round affects possible paths to victory in subsequent rounds, based on the moves available to the opponent. A single Letterpress game has fewer possible paths to walk down than chess, say, but there are nonetheless enough of them to make computing them all impractical. So, as with chess algorithms, clever techniques speed up the analysis by identifying and ditching the least promising solutions. And as with chess software, there are innumberable ways in which algorithms can be honed.

Apple has approved dozens of such programs in its online marketplace. Several developers have actually contacted Mr Brichter to ask for permission of sorts to roll out their cheater software. He obliges, asking only for a disclaimer to be included. A colleague even suggested a tournament where Letterpress AIs would battle it out among themselves, in the time-honoured tradition of contests pitting chess algorithms against one another. There, at least, no cheating would be possible.

We live in a transitional era of augmented awareness and possibly augmented intelligence.
We have a networked computer 24/7 in our back pocket.
Any question that can be asked, can be addressed by the world's libraries or databases and an answer spit out in milliseconds.
The new critical skill is being able to ask the right questions.

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And no student has to take a closed book exam.
It is an era of creative cheating.
And attention deficits.
And new electronic leashes.
And gadget addiction.

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There is a mental laziness:
Why do I have to learn and work on my education when I can look it up in a second on Google?

Information is not Knowledge.
And Knowledge is not Wisdom.
And Wisdom is not Common Sense.
And Common Sense is not being Critically Decisive at the Right Time.

Success in Life can be hinge on just a handful of Critical Life Decisions.
Google does not put you there.

These are indeed important questions, but success in life is a function of what you do, and who you become, after you've made these decisions. The consumerist (materialist) perspective of treating life as a series of events to optimize in a Darwinian fashion seems to be a fairly selfish, dehumanizing and empty way to live.

I've seen this many times; people come up with the oddest of words and it's obvious they're cheating. However, your example is interesting; it's a word that I might actually find. (In fact, as a writer in your field, one of my editors was thrilled when I used it in an article a few years ago.) And in a game with someone that we both know, my opponent was very surprised when I came up with Ayurvedic. He asked me if I knew the word, suggesting that perhaps I had had help. But some of us do crosswords, and are familiar with odd words.

I agree, though, that there is no reason to cheat. When Letterpress adds stats - which I hope will come soon - then it's likely that more people will do so.

No clue why people cheat? They want to win. Even if the winning is a lie, it's still a win.

Many people need to win. Some because they otherwise feel they aren't. Some because they have a need to win that can only be explained as pathological fear of losing. Some because they need to imagine themselves winning and their minds take the cheating wins and convert them imaginatively into real victories. And so on.

This is, however, hardly a new phenomena. Long before computers, we had people who cheated at solitaire (patience). Why they do so makes an interesting psychological study. But clearly it is a long-standing part of the human psyche.

Those who create the rules tend to make them in there advantage. Playing by the set rules only makes since when you believe you can win. When a certain probability of loosing is crossed it makes no since to play by the specified rules.

Lets say I'm down to a pawn and my king and you still have a queen and two castles. The best action is definitely to change the rules :-D. I think this is where pawns in passing comes from... Also, why the Spartans annexed the Olympics. No eye gouging or groin strikes??? Those are my best moves!

In order to pass Turing's imitation game (The Turing Test) the app will have tp do what a human does and give ONE response...or ask ONE question.

Watson does this by hierarchies of probabilities. The wide world is more complex - but its not infinite and big numbers is what machine intelligence does increasingly well. And actually there's Cantorian maths for infinities.

Infinite sentences..the cat sat on the mat and another mat and another mat etc can be reduced to symbolic equations. Large volumes of information can be made subject to quantization' -reduced to groups, classes later to be inflated. The human brain does this well.

A.I. will find new maths and zillions of ways to reduce data to manageable formulas, and as we have mechanized dishwashing and washing machines fro clothes, artificial systems will progressively do intellectual work, until we think on trends, all possible human brain work will be doable by machines about 2027.
This can be viewed as analogous to the flip of life to breathing in oxygen after breathing carbon dioxide for millions of years.
Biological systems will end rapidly...possibly in weeks..replaced by superior more sensitive and far more intelligent non-biolgical ones.

Oxford and Cambridge Universities are chugging away sort of at examining the existential risks for people, and what to do about it.

Matter will be building composites for the age of robots as the metabolize the Milky Way like mold on bread.

Only a visionary politician could halt Mankind's extinction. But there isn't one/